Tag: artists

RPS Executive Director, Rosie Johnson ponders what makes live music, and the RPS Music Awards, so special.

…contemplative, challenging, restorative, shared.

I nearly missed out on classical music. From a very early age my parents regularly took me to services at Canterbury Cathedral where my elder brothers were choristers. I was intoxicated by the music that I heard them sing, hugely impressed by the ritual and, let’s be honest, the idea of boarding school.

I just assumed that I would follow in their footsteps. When it was explained that I didn’t fit the brief, I came to a simple and, from my perspective, rather devastating conclusion: classical music was for boys.

It is easy to feel excluded from classical music….

….sometimes it’s the language used to describe it, or musical one-upmanship, where those without an encyclopaedic knowledge of repertoire or performance history are deemed unable to fully appreciate what they hear. And sometimes, there are more fundamental barriers: economic, social, cultural, disability… or (and it seems surprising to be writing this in the 21st century) being born a girl. And yet, music is the most embracing of art forms, and live music, by offering bespoke, yet collegiate experiences to both audiences and performers, is the most inclusive of the lot.

The winners of this year’s Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards will be announced on Tuesday 9 May. This awards ceremony is the only time each year that we celebrate the transformative, joyous experience of live music in the UK, in all its variety; those wondrous fleeting moments that are gone in a minute, but linger in the mind forever. And it’s this transient quality, a uniqueness that comes from unrepeatable listening, that sets live performance apart from recorded music. Recordings can capture that moment in time, but by allowing us to repeat it, over and over, a little of the magic of ‘liveness’ is lost….”

It’s never too late to learn another essential skill for the professional musician: how to deal with concert promoters. Whether you are taking part in a fund-raising concert in a village church or making your debut at the Wigmore Hall, it will be somebody’s job to market the event and to make all the practical arrangements. To do that they will need help from you – and they may need it much sooner than you expect.

Let’s say you’ve been booked for a date in February 2017 – more than a year away, so no need to think about it for months, you might imagine. But the concert may be part of a 2016/17 season with a booking brochure that is published in April or May. This means it will need to go to the printer in March, and the marketing manager for the series will need to start collating all the lists of artists, repertoire information, and images in January at the latest. Uploading it all to the venue’s website in time for the season launch is another lengthy task which will need to be started early in the year.

Then there’s the concert programme – again possibly spanning a season in one glossy brochure, but even if it’s just a sheet of A4 paper that can be printed off on the day, someone will need all the details of what you’re going to perform, a biography and a photo.

The same information may be needed for press releases, ideally with some sort of thread or ‘hook’ that can turn a list of pieces and performers into an interesting story that will catch the attention of a journalist and then engage their readers – your potential audience.

And of course there’s social media. The marketing team for your concert should be keen to build up a buzz about it, but that’s a two-way process that works best if you’re also using your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram accounts to interact and update your friends and followers about the forthcoming gig.

All this may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how many musicians and even some artists’ agents seem unprepared to meet the needs of the organisations that have booked them.

Most frustrating of all are the students and young performers who don’t reply to emails requesting photographs, biographies and repertoire details, nor to follow-up emails, answerphone messages or texts. They may have been given an opportunity to perform at a prestigious venue as a result of winning a scholarship award or prize – a vital showcase at an early stage of their career. The essential quid pro quo is that they have the necessary promotional materials ready; that they check emails and voicemail and respond promptly to requests, even if they are in the middle of exams or on the road giving performances.

Providing downloadable resources from a website is a very user-friendly option and these days that’s fairly easy to do, though it has to be kept up to date. But if you’re not ready to set up your own website, it’s fine to have an information pack ready on your laptop to send out to promoters or press. You’ll need long and short versions of your biography – bearing in mind that ‘short’ really does mean just a couple of hundred words – and a sequence of high-resolution photos.

Ah yes – photos. For the performer, these are not an indulgence but an essential tool of the trade. If you can possibly afford it, a session with a professional photographer is a worthwhile investment, and may not cost as much as you think. But modern digital cameras and even phone cameras will produce publishable results if the correct settings are used – there’s no excuse for providing a fuzzy shot taken from five rows back as you took your bow at your prizewinning concert. You might get away with it at postage-stamp size in a printed brochure, but it will almost certainly be published online as well and you’ll look as though you’ve been photographed in the Hall of Mirrors at a funfair.

Lastly, I’d like to make a plea to established artists and their agents to have new photos taken more frequently, and to include a wider variety of shots in each session. It’s bad enough to see the same images cropping up in the brochures of every festival and concert hall for a year – even worse to request an image for a new brochure and receive the same shot that was supplied the year before. Photos should be labelled with the artist’s name and a photographer’s credit so that the recipient can easily file them – having to rename endless downloads of ‘P00065341.jpg’ is the sort of chore hard-pressed administrators could certainly do without.

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The Royal Philharmonic Society is for people who love music and live music-making, and who want to ensure a vibrant future for classical music.

For over 200 years we’ve been at the heart of music: supporting and working creatively with talented young performers and composers, championing excellence, and encouraging audiences to listen to, and talk about, great music.